The Kafkaesque Show Trial of Mark Steyn

"[Inside the windowless courtroom] there's no link with the outside world except a clock, which is stuck at 8:00. And that's government bureaucracy for you. You know, in British Columbia, it claims to be able to eradicate hate, but it can't get someone in to restart the clock."

There will be no more live logging. As I left the courtroom for the lunch break [on Friday June 6], I was taken aside by a sheepish-looking court official, who said that he'd just learned that I had been "broadcasting" from inside the courtroom. So had I? Broadcasting, I said? I didn't have a microphone, or a camera.

No, he explained: but live logging counts as broadcasting. It's not the computer that's the problem. You can type away on it all you want. If you step outside to send it, that's okay, too. But if you send text from within the courtroom, that's broadcasting.

Anyway, I gave him my solemn word that I would do no more broadcasting. What with the hearings being almost over and all. It seemed a fitting way to put a cap on the week.

Despite the national media's general incompetence and indifference, many troubling or just plain bizarre developments during the trial made their way into the public record nevertheless:

My hope is that it will go to appeal -- in other words, I'm hoping that we lose this at the hearing level and that we appeal it to a proper court of law, as opposed to these quasi-judicial tribunals, and at that proper court of law that we make the constitutional argument that this is an infringement of our charter rights to freedom of the press. I believe that's what we'll do if we lose the case.

We want to lose so we can take it to a real court and if necessary up to the Supreme Court of Canada and we can get the ancient liberties of free-born Canadian citizens that have been taken away from them by tribunals like this.

We want those ancient civil liberties restored.

Musing on his surreal circumstances, Steyn wrote in what may be one of his last columns for Maclean's:

By the way, I see I've been nominated for a National Magazine Award, to be handed out later this month. By then, Mr. Joseph [the complainants' lawyer] will have succeeded in getting the B.C. troika effectively to ban me from Maclean's and from all Canadian journalism. An impressive achievement. My book was a No. 1 bestseller in Canada, and the new paperback edition was at No. 4 the other day, and President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Governor Mitt Romney, Senator Joe Lieberman, Senator Jon Kyl, and (at last count) six European prime ministers have either recommended the book or called me in to discuss its themes.